India’s First Catholic-Run Law College Opens

INDIAN CATHOLIC, July 14 — The Carmelites of Mary Immaculate have opened a law college attached to their Christ College in Bangalore, making it India’s first Catholic-managed college of law, the Asian news service reported.

Members of Carmelites of Mary Immaculate, India’s first indi-genous religious congregation began in Kerala, work all over India in varied fields such as education, social welfare and healthcare.
Christ College of Law opened July 12. The college will be one of the 16 colleges affiliated to the Bangalore University. Some 80 students have already enrolled for this year, Father John Thaliath, the college’s dean, said.

He said the college aims to create a better and value-based society by producing graduates who respect truth and have sharp reasoning capacities. The college would strive to keep up the tradition of Carmelites in the field of education.

Catholic Priests Become Sought-After Polish Export

REUTERS, July 18 — Half of the missionaries at Krakow’s Franciscan Missionary Center leave this southern Polish city for nearby European countries or just over the Atlantic Ocean to North America, Reuters reported.

Priests have become a top “export product” as Poland, where the Catholic Church retains a vibrant strength lost in the rest of Europe, helps fill the dwindling ranks of clergy in the West.

“The Church is universal, not just Polish,” said Father Marek Lesniak at the Krakow seminary, whose alumni man parishes of this large archdiocese and also work in Austria, Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United States as well as Russia, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil.

“We are not a seminary for missionaries, but if someone has a calling for the missions, he can go,” said the deputy director of the 600-year-old seminary where the late Pope John Paul — an inspiration for many of the young students here — once studied. The situation has not gone unnoticed at the Vatican, where Pope Benedict urged Polish bishops visiting him last December to keep up the missionary work.

“Encourage your priests to do their missionary service or pastoral work in countries where clergy are scarce,” he told them. “It seems that today this is a special task and, in a certain sense, also a duty of the Church in Poland.”

African Bishop Cautions Against Foreign Force

ALLAFRICA, July 18 — The apostolic administrator of Mogadishu said the international community should not hurry to intervene in Somalia following the growing control of the country by the Union of Islamic Courts, according to the African news service.

Bishop Giorgio Bertin, OFM, of Djibouti said the best thing to do is to wait and see how the situation develops in the coming days.

“Outside interventions can sometimes make things worse rather than better,” he said. “It is enough to see what happened in recent months when support offered to the ephemeral War Lords’ alliance proved to be [the] ulterior incentive for the Islamic Courts.

“Somali society is extremely complex,” Bishop Bertin added. “It is very difficult to intervene from outside without upsetting things. It remains to be seen if the Islamic factor succeeds in overcoming traditional Somali clan traditions.”